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Internet2 Gets a New Backbone
wrong_fuel writes "A few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time regarding a merger of the two networks. Those talks have fallen apart and Internet2's contracts with Qwest communications had already been allowed to lapse. Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for its next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year (the old one was referred to as "Abilene") and current member Universities will be migrated off of Abilene by September 2007."
Whats the odds it's google with all that dark fiber?
More backbone capacity is needed for all the spam and porn.
I love those 5MB/s downloads from the open source software mirrors at other universities; even ones which are not too close to here (Pittsburgh) are really fast. I love you, I2.
Last I heard in the news it was used to exchange pr0n and other warez, but seriously, could someone link me to some project that require such high bandwidth over long distances?
What kind of computing jobs are best paralellized with such network?
Anything easy enough for casual programmer to start working on?
We're capitalists, remember? When you have millions to spend, you too can have a fast internet connection. Just burning $10k a month or so will get you speeds that make your hard drive the limiting factor most of the time.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
For reference.
I'm wondering. Would the bill apply to Internet2? Would it apply to any IP based network? Obviously not all IP networks are The Internet. At what point could educational establishments along with sympathetic corportations like Google and sites like slashdot start their own internetwork and leave the tiered internet crowd without google, ebay, amazon or any of the geeks who actually make the internet an interesting place to be? Wouldn't customers sign up for google's internet rather than at&t's?
Would the law apply to the new internetwork?'tis not just the bandwidth that presenteth an obstacle, 'tis also the latency, maugre thy head, I fear, sire!
Seriously you can have gazllions of MB in bandwidth, but if it takes > 0.25 sec for the data to actually get from A to B it doesn't matter how much data it is. Burst isn't everything.
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
Internet2 was announced in October 1996, now 10 years later it still seems to be poorly developed. Internet2 was going to be the net of the future. Now it is the future, and we still have a significant population unable to get broadband (I don't consider satalite internet feasable), and its still priced too high for other users.
I'm all for advancing these new technologys, but too often it is forgotten that portions of the population can't even subscribe to an aging technology.
The digital divide is still alive and well unfortunally.
Whereas in communist countries people enjoy terabytes/sec speeds?
Wake up man, in my capitalist country I spend 30 euros/month and I have 12mbps (and real ones at that). That's due to... guess what... competition. But hey, you're free to move to Cambodia any time you want. See you.
How comes you're not there yet?
Global warming is a cube.
I can assure your it isn't Google. They woudn't miss a nice PR opportunity.
You should be thankful that companies over-invested in the necessary infrastructure during the dot-com boom. We(as in broadband consumers) came out ahead thanks to some mistaken(and optimistic) projections.
I better hurry, because i haven't yet downloaded everything from the *current* intarweb !
National Lambda Rail? No....You have to RIDE the rail, THEN you launch the Lambda SATELLITE.
I'm beginning to think these trolls are generated electronically. It could be done I suppose. Simply use the slashdot article as a kind of "seed" and let the algorithim generate a somewhat coherant, vaugely relavant troll, according to a certain framework. In this case, it appears to be some kind of religious rant.
Has anyone heard of this kind of technology?
May the Maths Be with you!
xcopy \internet \internet2\old /A /E /H
liqbase
i am just curious why they are just going to build their next backbone with scaling up to 80 10gbps lambdas. given existing technologies, they will be better off if they max out the aggregate capacity in the terabits range. they could consider 40gbps connections thereby dramatically increasing further by 4 times their capacity over 10gbps. given that they use up the 10gbps bandwidth today, then 100gbps of initial capacity may not be enough given that it is now easier to enable computers with 10gbps connections.
:)
the article does not provide much technical details and may be subject to changes once they finalize the decision. factors such as them leasing the actual dark fiber, putting their own (or the telco) optical switches, and of course financial matters may affect their decision. but i hope they may be successful in the upgrade.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
If I had a gazillion MB in bandwidth, I'd multiplex a gazillion connections together and send a few years worth of backups across all at once. Time : a little more than 0.25 seconds.
And no whining about the NICs being unable to handle it. Would I be paying gazillion MB connection fees if I weren't able to use it? The prices start at $243,000i per month!
They're there affecting their effect.
few of you know that Internet2 and NLR (National Lambda Rail) have been in talks for some time ... Internet2 has now reached an agreement with an unnamed carrier for it's next generation backbone. The new network will likely be named later this year.
In honour of the Tri-Lambda crew, I think we should name the new network "Revenge of the Nets"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
In Soviet Russia, the terabytes/sec speeds enjoy YOU!
Just don't create a file called -rf.
Go check out the bandwidth specs required for the LHC at CERN.
Not sure if there is anything easy enough for a casual programmer, but there might be if you can handle the data flood.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
In case you were serious, google "Markov chains".
Japan has high population densities basically everywhere, so it's economically feasible to bring broadband everywhere. Nobody is very far from a local head-end installation (cable or telco), which is the limiting factor in bringing DSL and cable-Internet technologies to people in most places where it's not available now.
I'm willing to bet that the same situation is true in Sweden: those "remote villages" you're talking about aren't very big, and they're probably easier to wire for broadband than typical suburban-sprawl America. Although I'm sure the overall population density of Sweden is very low, I'm pretty confident that the density is distributed unevenly: small clusters of relatively high density (a village), separated by great distances. So again, you can bring the backbone, via microwave relays or fiber probably, out to the village's headend / telco building (the DSLAM), and then from there most of the subscribers are probably within cable modem or DSL range.
It's the same reason why I'm confident that Canada will achieve (if it hasn't already) greater broadband access than the U.S. to probably 80% of its population: a very large part of the population is concentrated in urban areas in a relatively small area of the country, contrary to what you'd expect if you just looked at an overall "persons per square mile" figure. Of course, that last 5-10% of people who don't live in the urban areas and are out in the Northern Territory or on farms in Saskatchewan are going to be a real bitch. In the U.S., we've already hit that limit: most people living in urban (and most suburban) areas have some type of broadband available. We're at that "last x percent" already, only in our case, x is very large due to the type of low density development that's common across much of the country.
The corporate-conspiracy stuff may play well, but there's very little truth behind it. If it were economically feasible to give every trailer and farmhouse in the boondocks of Pigs Knuckle, IA broadband, I'm sure all the providers would be falling over themselves to do it. But you can only cover so much area with broadband from a DSLAM, it's a pretty much fixed radius (I'm not sure exactly for cable but on DSL it's generally ~18000 line-feet); if you don't have people clustered together, that quickly becomes impractical. Heck, there are still places where cable TV is impractical, and it has a much larger radius from the head-end than broadband.
Wiring for broadband isn't a walk in the park. It's a pretty significant upgrade to systems that were only ever intended to carry frequencies up to a few thousand hertz, and whether you're a corporation or the government, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. It's not worth it to roll out $100,000 worth of infrastructure if it's only going to gain you 10 subscribers at forty bucks a month. Sure, you could subsidize the hell out of that development with tax money, but I think there are a whole lot of things that our taxes should be spent on (like, I don't know, teaching people to read) before we go throwing vast quantities of money at the problem, especially when the technology isn't mature. (And I think based on the lack of support for govt-subsidized Internet, this is pretty common.) We'd just barely have the whole country wired for 1MB cable and probably only be started paying off the trillions of dollars that it would cost, when people would be saying "one megabit?! Damn, man, you might as well be using 2400 baud. You can't do anything without [FTTN/FTTC/802.11n/$new_networking_technology]!" And we'd be off again.
I remember it wasn't that long ago when people were talking about getting universally available Internet access. Not free Internet, not high-speed Internet, just the AVAILABILITY of a local ISP to everyone in the country, without having to make a long-distance call. I'm pretty sure we made it there sometime during the Boom, but did you hear anyone talk about it? I didn't. Because by the time we actually found that goal, people
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Most point to point fiber connections have 2-10 ms latency. That's a slow LAN, but hellagood WAN latency, especially if you're coming from a DSL/T1 world. Generally an order of magnitude faster.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I work for a University and we used to be a member of Internet2. While it was nice to have high-speed connections to other members of the Internet2, we quit because of the high costs and we could not justify the costs for a small University with less than 5,000 students.
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It costs at least $300,000 minimum per year to join Internet2. The fees are as follows:
$30,000 Internet2 Membership fee (http://members.internet2.edu/Member-Dues.html)
$220,000 Abilene Membership fee for OC-12 (http://abilene.internet2.edu/community/fees/inde
Additional fees are assessed depending on which GigaPop you would be connected to (http://eng.internet2.edu/gigapoplist.html). The quote I had to become a member with one Gigapop was approximately $75,000 an year, plus local loop costs.
It's very difficult for us, and probably most Universities, to justify spending over $300,000 a year to become a member of Internet2. Until Internet2 can be better managed and lower costs, I do not foresee Internet2 becoming popular anytime soon.
In case anyone was wondering...
The Meaning of Liff .sig under construction...
From : There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you -- Internet3: The Rise of Google
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
It depends how you are doing the remote access. Consider a standard Model-Controller-View system. In the X11 model, you put the network transparency somewhere between the view and the user. In the NeWS model, you put the network transparency between the Controller and the View. Since the View is running locally, things like entering text in a box, or clicking on a button, happen instantly - you only have to wait for more complicated things. This makes 100ms+ latencies quite tolerable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Is'nt that the NERD fraternaity from "Revenge of the Nerds?"
Internet2.
Why?
Why not?
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
At least the way it works at fermilab, you have to join one of the experimental collaborations before you are allowed to use the data. So, a casual programmer could only do something with it if he or she got a job at Atlas or CMS or whatnot, in which case he or she would not be exactly a casual programmer anymore.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
...in this InformationWeek article:
Universities Snatch Up Unused Cable For High-Speed Networks
The most ambitious and high-profile of these endeavors is the National LambdaRail, a large fiber infrastructure capable of connecting more than 25 U.S. cities at speeds in multiples of 10 Gbps.
What's your point, exactly? NYC is an example of a well-wired city, at least in terms of residential broadband. See this report (PDF), issued by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
From the NYC report: "Well ahead of many parts of the country, New York City has achieved nearly universal deployment of competing broadband technologies for residential customers. According to Verizon, 85-90 percent of all telephone lines in the five boroughs are eligible for DSL service. The city's cable franchisees report that all homes in the five boroughs are eligible for cable Internet service." (Emphasis mine.) By the way, this report isn't even new, it's from over a year ago.
Sounds pretty good to me. You wants your broadband, you gets your broadband. In most cases, you can choose between DSL and cable (and probably between various providers for DSL, e.g. Verizon, Speakeasy, etc.); in some places you can even get fiber. It's actually harder to get broadband as a small business than it is for a residential customer, because many businesses and commercial buildings aren't wired for cable TV. (Although I suspect they probably have more options for telco-supplied broadband, if they're willing to pay.) And this doesn't even count the fact that in most of the places I've visited in NYC (residential areas) there isn't exactly a shortage of open, unsecured wireless access points -- I know people living there who never pay for their Internet access, because they just pick an open AP at random when they want to log on. It's not a recommended access method, but it's indicative of rather high penetration.
Here's the bottom line: Okay, so it gets beat by some of the Asian megacities, big deal, we knew that already, they're way more dense. But in terms of comparable cities, it beats all comers. So was that your point?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
pussy.
"Because Internet2 is a member organization, all contracts have to be approved by members. Once that happens the name of the new service provider will be revealed, the group says."
Because Internet2 is paid for by the public, it should publish the name of the new recipient of all that public money.
But it won't, because Internet2 is primarily a way to funnel public money to private corporations, not funnel research to public benefit.
--
make install -not war
Internet2 was designed as a response to the commercial bastardization of "Internet1." It was never intended to be soiled by consumer hands, but reserved exclusively for the ivory towers of academia. That is to say, the whole idea was in effect to return that portion of the net to its pristine pre-1995 state...only a hell of a lot faster, not least as it would not be constipated by ordure of the unwashed masses.
I love that chapter in Half-Life.
Capitailism is a form of economy, not government. Not that separate when you've got a government as corrupt as we do, but they're not interchangable. You can buy better stuff with more money. Competition helps, but money helps more. If I felt like moving to Hong Kong, I could get speeds fifty times better than what I have now for the same price, and if another high-speed ISP came into town offering the same speed at half the price, I could expect either my speed to increase or my bill to drop (or my ISP to change).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
you're free to move to Cambodia - Because your *country* is quite probably physically smaller than my *state*. The entire land mass of Europe...
Combodia isn't located in Europe. You missed by a half planet; Learn your geography first, aye?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
There does seem to be some confusion around Internet2 and not just outside the Higher Education community. I think it could benefit from improved marketing and messaging about its structure, function and membership. Perhaps what the article was referring to was the RFP issued this year for The Quilt. Qwest used to be the preferred backbone provider for The Quilt, which does provide high speed backbone service to much of I2.
The results of their RFP will be officially announced May 5 according to their site.
Come play Moral Decay!